Not much is known as to what was the cause of the Beaverdell Hotel fire that took place last Monday.
RCMP are waiting for the results to come back from the Office of the Fire Commissioner’s investigators. Staff Sgt. Jim Harrison of the Grand Forks RCMP said that the investigation is ongoing.
Harrison said that they have received the preliminary investigation results.
“It’s very difficult to prove, obviously, that there was an arson, because all of your evidence burns up,” he said
Harrison said they are working on finding witnesses and are not giving up on the case. “It’s probably going to be one of those ones that takes quite a while though,” he added.
“It’s the nature of it, and how many people we have to talk to, whatever we can shake loose, background things that we have to do to see if we can establish motive, there’s a lot of work to be done.”
Bill Wellwood, fire chief of the Beaverdell Volunteer Fire Department, agreed with Harrison.
“We consider the nature of the fire suspicious and that’s about it, now I’m just leaving it up to the investigators to find out what they can find out if anything,” he said.
“It’s a big disappointment to the community, a big, big disappointment because it’s been a part of the history of Beaverdell and people… still consider it a part of Beaverdell heritage.”
He added that not much of the original town is left.
They got a call at 2:09 a.m. and by the time they got there the building was already in flames.
“When we arrived it was totally engulfed,” said Wellwood.
He added that he heard somebody has given testimony that they passed the building at 1:45 a.m. and there was nothing bizarre going on.
Wellwood says that it isn’t too surprising that the building could go up that fast.
“The inside of the building was cedar paneling and stuff like that and the building was 110 years old so it was pretty dry,“ Wellwood said.
The volunteer firefighters had to spray down the roof of the nearby Tamarack Lodge, the building to the south and spent a fair bit of time dousing a power pole at the northwest corner of the hotel to keep it from burning up.
“We didn’t want to spray any more than half way because there was a transformer on top of it and some of the cables were arcing, so it was live. You want to stay away from that sort of thing.”
He said that it is possible for water to conduct electricity down to the firefighter holding the hoses.
The crew spent most of the night trying to keep the fire contained then put it out. They tried foam on the fire but didn’t see any effect on it in the middle of the building.